ABSTRACT
THE writer on family structure is at once caught up in the problem of whether enumeration can ever bear much relation to reality. The census deals with households, not families, and frequently this has coloured sociological thinking, and in practice social planning, so that in England when we talk of family structure what we usually mean is household structure. Because of this the family has come to mean mother, father, plus own children, which appears to be the usual content of a middle-class household. In this latter case it is almost as if the convention of the small house or bungalow has started to alter some of the functional relationships within the family to suit the building.
